The Subatomic Kid (24 page)

“Oh, yeah, you and whose army?” Tex fumed, as he caught Cal with a couple of really nasty clips.

John gunned the engine and screamed out of the filling station.

***

Steve thought that paying for the kid’s gas was a stroke of genius, and he wished he had thought of it. He imagined it would throw the kids into paroxysms of panic, and maybe even render them immobile. After all, they must have imagined they’d escaped, and he could only conjecture how demoralizing it would be to realize that Hunter was right on their tail.

Thus it was a total and complete surprise to him when their limousine screeched out of the gas station, slipped into the traffic, and was gone. His reaction was immediate; he fired up the engine and took off after them with a squeal of rubber that would have made Dirty Harry proud. There was only one problem: he had forgotten the fuel tank was being filled with gas.

Hunter was thrown back in his seat with a force that knocked him senseless. “Groink,” he shouted, which Steve interpreted to mean good luck, and it gave him the extra, added resolve to continue undaunted in his pursuit.

The nozzle on the fuel line was secured by teeth that snapped tightly over a collar inside the fuel tank. When Steve took off, the teeth gripped even tighter, and the tension on the fuel line caused the whole apparatus to fuse solidly as if the car and the nozzle were welded together.

The attendant ran at the car, waving his arms furiously, urging it to stop, but to no avail. Steve blew right by him, stretching the hose to the breaking point. The hose didn’t break though; instead it pulled the gas pump along with it. The pump leapt off its concrete mooring like a hippo jumping into a waterhole, snapping the pipe that connected it to an underground tank, which had been newly filled with petroleum that morning. When the pump was dragged away, a spout of gasoline shot forth from below, and squirted fifteen feet into the air.

To add insult to injury, the metal casing of the gas pump was now being dragged along behind the car by the hose, like a doll with one arm. It was spraying showers of sparks that bombarded the waves of gasoline rippling along behind it. The resulting explosion blew the gas pump up into the air, which miraculously unhooked the hose from the gas tank. As the metal casing catapulted higher, secondary explosions erupting from the gasoline contained in the pipes inside it twisted the poor gasoline pump into the shape of a pretzel.

Fireballs of gas and smoke leapt high in the air as Steve slipped out of the gas station and into the traffic, blissfully unaware of the destruction he had left in his wake. Dodging the remnants of the fuel pump as it crashed to earth, the attendant, singed and smoking from the fire, ran out angrily onto the sidewalk and began jumping up and down, literally hopping mad.

***

As John sped out of the filling station, Cal released Tex. He had saved him from an impetuous hotheaded rage that would have just gotten them all into trouble, but Tex didn’t see it that way.

“You should’ve let me go after them,” Tex complained, “I could have taken them down.”

“Maybe you should thank him instead of whining like a baby,” Kate said. “He spared you the indignity of making a fool of yourself.”

“No, I’ve seen him beating up doors, walls, and goal posts, and I just had to hold him back, ‘cause those two guys with guns would never have stood a chance,” said Cal sarcastically.

“What’s that behind us?” John shouted, and the three of them glanced up as a huge ball of flame illuminated the night sky.

Cal and Tex scrambled onto the back seat and peered out of the rear window, as Kate clambered over the top of her seat and joined them.

John saw them coming in the side mirror, and feeling he was far more experienced as a driver—after all, he’d had at least an hours’ experience—he pushed his foot to the floor and grimaced at the road ahead. He switched lanes to dodge around and through the traffic, as horns blared and lights flashed, but try as he might, he could do nothing to shake them off. The second limo clung to his tail like a bad case of fleas on a dog.

***

Miss Moon pulled back Doctor Leitz’ eyelid and peered at his electric-blue pupil. Having administered the antidote for the control worm, she now wondered if he was showing any sign of regaining consciousness. Kurt Angstrom stared confidently down at his half-brother from his wheelchair. He had never been beaten in his life, although he had been close to defeat on many occasions; he was one of those few who always pulled something out of the bag at the very last moment; or to put it correctly, fate always gave in at the last moment and delivered him the coup de grâce. Perhaps it was because he’d had his quota of bad luck all in one go; but who knew?

He sneered at the sunflowers; it was so over for them, and as far as he knew, the scientific equipment that once held the promise of help was useless. He shook his head in frustration; perhaps the time had come to rid himself of his half-brother once and for all. Besides, he’d had his eye on a very promising English physicist who could do the job just as well. He made a mental note to have Hunter kidnap him and bring him over to the States.

Doctor Leitz groaned, “What happened to me?” He rolled over groggily and stared up at Kurt Angstrom.

“You tried to double-cross me, brother,” Angstrom said menacingly.

Leitz blinked his eyes, trying to focus. “Tried to what? No! It was that horrible child; he’s evil.” He gazed off to one side, trying to recall details of his recent delirium. “And something else inside my mind…a tango-dancing, one-footed, spineless milquetoast from south of the border, who goes by the name of Martini!”

Doctor Angstrom and Miss Moon exchanged furtive glances. “You have been under much strain; you need to take some rest. I think a long vacation is in order,” Angstrom strongly suggested.

“Vacation!” Leitz yelled, sitting bolt upright, “I don’t have time for a vacation, I am poised upon the greatest scientific discovery of the twenty-first century! I must get back to work.”

“Unfortunately, that’s impossible,” said Miss Moon ironically. “You have destroyed your laboratory.”

Although his head was woozy, Leitz had a vague recollection of disco balls and sunflowers. He had thought it was a dream, but now, as the scales fell from his eyes, he realized it was all true. He had been forced out of his own mind, and the result of his dementia had been devastating.

He touched his chin gingerly, and a stabbing pain shot to his brain. He looked searchingly at Miss Moon, and then at Kurt Angstrom. He had a shrewd idea they were at the bottom of his descent into lunacy, but he also knew that discretion was called for. He would settle his score with them when the time was right, but for now he had to wriggle his way back into their good graces.

At the present moment his anger was focused solely on one individual; the person who had ruined his experiment, and his plan to steal all the glory for himself. John Smith, he was the one who was truly responsible for this maelstrom of insanity.

It’s strange how the wheels of scientific discovery turn; they are powered by need, need produces a problem, and then the agile mind of the dedicated scientist applies itself to the discovery of a solution. But all of the endless hours, days and weeks of working out mathematical formulas, the months of building equipment, and the years of experimentation are really only creating the territory, then building highways, roads, and side roads through it.

Great scientific discovery comes in traveling those roads endlessly, like Jack Kerouac; it’s the road that leads to that one blinding moment of enlightenment—a eureka moment that comes when the road dead-ends at a canyon in the middle of a dark night, and all hope seems lost.

“I never reversed the field!” Leitz blurted out in amazement.

“What?” Miss Moon exclaimed.

“In the first experiment, I suspended the atomic structure of the chair and the boy, but I only reversed the field on the chair, because at that time I didn’t know about the boy.”

“That is not important,” scoffed Doctor Leitz as he programmed a series of codes into his computer, “the atomic structure is stored in memory. I just have to enter the human signature and bring it back.”

Miss Moon and Doctor Angstrom stared at the mad scientist as he illuminated the grid background. It was the only light in the room, and surrounded as it was by sunflowers, it seemed like the stage was set for a momentous event. Neither of them, however, could even imagine what it would be.

Doctor Leitz leaned over the panel and grasped the lever that reversed the fields. He pulled it toward him slowly and glanced up at the impromptu stage. Doctor Angstrom and Amelia Moon followed his gaze. For a moment nothing happened, and then there was a glimmer as a cloud of softly glowing particles began coming into focus. The particles glowed brighter and shimmered into a shape; then the shape slowly began to coalesce into a figure, and what they saw next left them all completely dumbfounded.

A TIME AND SPACE FOR EVERYTHING

One of life’s little oddities is curve balls. It loves to pitch them right down the center, but once you commit to your swing, the damn ball swerves away from the bat and leaves you swatting at air. It’s a humiliating experience, full of frustration and anxiety; but it’s all part of the game and it’s going to happen over and over again, so you’d better get used to it.

John, Kate, Cal, and Tex had just been thrown a vicious curve ball, which they thought they were going to hit clear out of the park. But the physics of motion declared otherwise and left them swinging in the wind. Hunter, on the other hand, had connected with his pitch, and he was rounding the bases as his limousine bore down on the kids from behind.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Hunter yelled as he regained his composure. “You’ve just totally decimated an innocent gas station!”

Steve thought Hunter must have gotten a bump on the head that had knocked the sense out of him. “What?”

There are two sides to this coin
, Hunter thought. On the one hand Steve was so dedicated to the pursuit of these kids that he completely blocked out everything else going on around him. That fact, of course, was a positive. But the devastation he caused was totally unacceptable; they were, after all, stealth warriors, and it just didn’t look good to go around wreaking havoc
.
“Take a look behind you,” he snapped with extreme annoyance.

Steve glanced in the rearview mirror at the irate silhouette of the station attendant doing a war dance against a giant gas ball of fuel, flame, and smoke. “How on earth did that happen?” he asked in innocent amazement.

Hunter knew getting into Steve’s ridiculous mistake now would be an exercise in futility. They had a job to do, and Steve needed his concentration to catch up with the kids. He would just have to put the gas station down to an unfortunate side effect of war. “Just catch those damn teenagers,” he wailed in frustration.”

“Yes, sir,” Steve replied, pushing his foot to the floor.

Hunter watched the limo in front of them dance away. They were on a well-lit main thoroughfare with three lanes of traffic going in their direction. They had no problem keeping tabs on the kids, except that the little showoff who was driving began weaving through the nighttime traffic like a stunt driver.
The kid is clever
, he thought,
although somewhat predictable
. He figured this kid learned the geometry of the car chase from watching television shows and movies. However, the truth about the car chase is that the pursuer always has the upper hand, as long as he hangs onto the guy running away until the guy makes a mistake, or runs out of gas. “Just keep applying the pressure from behind,” Hunter called out to Steve, “and make sure he knows it.”

***

It was one of those balmy nights; the moon hung in the sky overhead like a nightlight and filled John’s imagination with magic. He knew he was in the hot seat; his hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles turned white, and every ounce of concentration was so involved with navigating through traffic, he felt he actually was both the car and the road ahead. He didn’t know if it was the moon, the stars, or just the pure exhilaration of speed, but he felt invincible. The faster he moved, the slower everything else around him became, and he knew with certainty he could slip through spaces in traffic that under any other circumstance would have been impossible to pass through.

It was as if high speed had somehow affected the molecular structure of the vehicle itself, and given it a minute amount of elasticity. The idea was completely crazy, but he could tell when he glanced in the rearview mirror that he was passing through gaps in the traffic that the limo behind was not even attempting.

He had absolutely no idea whether this was a lurid invention of the mind, or a concrete reality but one thing was absolutely certain; he had never felt more alive in his life. Was he out of control, or was he in control? Did it even matter?
Just do it
, he thought! Do it because you can. Life is a gift that doesn’t come with instructions, and if it did, many of the greatest inventions would never have come to light.